"My things are not supposed to have a short lifespan. They are supposed to outlive me, because I have devoted my synapses to getting used to them, and I did not bargain for getting used to something new."

The telephone handset is black, and it has a GE logo on it. Unlike most people who bought it, I know that it was not manufactured by General Electric. It is manufactured by Thomson, the French company to which GE Chairman Jack Welch traded away the General Electric small appliance business, and the GE logo with it, in exchange for RCA and NBC.

And the handset is broken. It broke, in fact, out of industrial frustration. I slammed the receiver down after a particularly annoying telephone solicitation call. Something snapped within it, and now it rattles when I move it, and voices come out sounding like they are taking place in an airline hangar, filtered through a skein of live bees.

I have talked to four people at Thomson, trying to get them to sell me a new handset. They no longer sell handsets. The part has been discontinued. I talk to four people, each with a different set of hold messages, in customer service. Finally I call back and ask to speak to the press department. I tell him I'm going to do an article about how Thompson is deliberately fostering planned obsolescence. I'm furious now, and my voice rises. I snap at him.

"My next article will be about this."

"YouÕre trying to threaten me," he says.

Damn right I am. But what am I trying to threaten him with? I guess IÕm trying to threaten him with heartbreak. It breaks my heart to have a house filled with junk. It breaks my sense of moral dignity to throw out a telephone because the handset is broken. In another era, it would have been made out of metal, and I would have known how to fix it. But now the mold is plastic, and I would need a machine shop, or a plastic lathe, or an extensive electronic awareness to fix it.

The phone has made me weary. It is supposed, like all labor-saving devices, to make my life easier, and it has sapped vitality out of my life. I have bought a replacement, but I am unwilling to throw out the old one. I lies in the basement, in a pile of old dead coffee makers and toaster-ovens and computer disk drives, the outmoded junk that has been replaced that has nowhere to go because I can't bring myself to throw it out.

That was last November. Now it's February. My agent, Joe Spieler, leans across a restaurant table with a conspiratorial look in his eye. He is a big man, not quite a bear Ñ more like a tuskless walrus. He has grown paler over the years as his hair has lightened. And he has grown more thoughtful. He wants to suggest a topic for a book, which is thoroughly within his purview -- he's a literary agent -- but he looks a little ashamed of this book subject. It has to do with the things corporations should do, but don't, and suddenly I'm way ahead of him.

"I bought a tape recorder--" I say.

"Tape recorders always break," he says. "I tell my clients to run them once every few weeks, or the mechanisms freeze solid. I don't know why they do that."

I am so excited to hear this sympathetic frustration, I can barely wait for him to stop. "And then there was this telephone--" I say.

"Telephone!" he exclaims.

And we're off and running. I tell him about the way a Radio Shack clerk tried to sell me a service plan Ñ extortion money that covers the fact that nobody builds products with the expectation that they will last any more. Nobody is willing to guarantee their work.. The agent tells me about a mysterious Toyota ailment that no one could fix. I tell him about the telephone handset.

"I wish," I say, "that someone would open a repair shop that I could subscribe to. Instead of a warranty extension plan, I want someone to be able to keep rejuvenating these things that I am attached to. They are not supposed to have a short lifespan. They are supposed to outlive me, because I have devoted my synapses to getting used to them, and I did not bargain for getting used to something new."

Joe and I part company, and the streets back to Grand Central are lined with electronics shops; the second stories are full of wholesalers, piled with boses stamped in Japanese and Korean and Malay characters. Inside each is an army of new things, an endless march of stuff that everyone wants, not because we want the stuff, but because we want to be greater than our stuffless selves can be. Each new thing I own becomes part of me, and the pile of phones and coffeemakers and cars and tape recorders, it is my old skin, molted metal scattered across my basement and everyone's, waiting to flake into dust.